Big companies are ramping up demands that networking equipment makers such as Cisco Systems Inc. offer cheaper, software-based alternatives to traditional products. Some of Cisco Systems Inc.’s big customers, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc., are adding to the pressure on Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers to accelerate the company’s push into software-driven networking, Bloomberg reports.
The networking giant agreed to host the internal phone and video conferencing systems of Coca-Cola Enterprises, for instance, after the bottler threatened to find a new supplier. “By the end of this year, there won’t be any more Cisco boxes in our offices,” CIO Esat Sezer said.
The switch from traditional, physical switches and routers to less expensive commodity hardware, paired with software, represents a massive shift in networking, an industry Cisco has dominated. An increasing number of customers are catching on to SDN’s promise of lower prices and new opportunities for innovation. As readers of CIO Journal know, IT executives from FedEx Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Co. and other firms have promised to use “the collective strength” of a cross-industry user group to force vendors to accelerate the deployment of software-defined networking, which substitutes standards-based software for proprietary hardware and software.
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